Government funds Hilo Catholic shelter without safety exits

An emergency shelter for women in Hilo with funding from the state and county hasn’t been inspected by county fire inspectors since it opened five years ago, and the bedrooms lack the required emergency exits.

Hope Services Hawaiʻi received $575,000 from Hawaiʻi County’s Housing and Homelessness Fund in 2025 to operate the Hale Maluhia shelter, and was awarded another $1.5 million in the most recent allocations from the fund. It also received $362,000 from the state Office of Housing and Homelessness last year.

As a nonprofit arm of the Hawaiʻi Catholic diocese, Hope Services operates seven housing shelters on the Big Island together offering 168 beds. Since April 2020,Hale Maluhia on Ululani Street has provided short-term crisis accommodation for single women and allows service animals. Residents pay a maximum of $150 per month to stay there.

But there is no record of the building being inspected by the county’s fire prevention bureau, spokesperson Tom Callis confirmed Thursday. Inspections on the Big Island are triggered by direct complaints, and Callis said the county hasn’t received any for Hale Maluhia.

Kiona Boyd, a current Hale Maluhia resident, is concerned that the lack of accessible emergency exits poses a risk to residents, many of whom have mental health, substance abuse or other disability issues.

“The shelter does not have adequate escape exits in the rooms of the single-wall construction building,” Boyd said, “and none of the seven units have even one operable window.”

The Hawaiʻi County building code specifies that “sleeping rooms below the fourth story … shall have at least one exterior emergency escape and rescue opening.”

Following renovations, the property did pass a 2021 inspection by the county’s building division to ensure compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, but that checklist only covers fire alarm accessibility features and clearance areas around fire extinguishers — not exits.

The lack of secondary exits also appears to fall short of minimum habitability standards for emergency shelters laid out by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which requires a “second means of exiting the building in the event of fire or other emergency.” HUD did not respond to a request for an interview with a representative of the Hawaiʻi field office to clarify what would meet that standard.

Provider Says Systems Are In Place

Fire safety issues on the Big Island, and gaps in county fire inspections were exposed in December by the deaths of three people in fires in Hilo buildings that had never received fire safety inspections.

While staff from the county Office of Housing and Community Development had inspected Section 8-approved housing at one of those locations, they had failed to note a conversion of the neighboring building to housing units without permits, Civil Beat later found.

Senior Hope Services staff said that the windows in Hale Maluhia are not intended to serve as emergency exits and acknowledged that a single door was the only access point to the units, which house up to four residents.

“We take a lot of precautionary measures because a lot of the population that we serve are traumatized,” Hope Services director of operations Denise Oguma said.

The county had no reason to inspect Hale Maluhia, she said, which Hope Services leases from St. Joseph Parish, although Oguma said it has inspected other buildings that Hope Services owns in Hilo.

A minor fire broke out in May at another emergency housing shelter operated by Hope Services in Pahoa, the Sacred Heart Public Shelter Housing Units. At the time, only one person was living in the 10-unit wooden building, Oguma said, and the fire was easily extinguished.

After the recent fires, county council vice chair Dennis Onishi said this week that organizations funded by the Office of Housing and Community Development should review contracts involving multi-family dwellings “and make sure they are up to code.”

Windows Too High, But Offer Only Escape

Access to each of Hale Maluhia’s seven housing units is through a steel screen door from the parking lot that opens into a shared kitchen-dining area. A small hallway connects that area with bedrooms at the rear that each sleep two people.

The only exits from those bedrooms are the jalousie windows.

The shelter can accommodate up to 26 people and two staff members. Fire extinguishers and smoke alarms with 10-year batteries are installed in each unit, but the building does not have a sprinkler system or emergency lighting.

While sprinkler systems are not mandatory, they are recommended for commercial buildings like Hale Maluhia, said Onishi, who was the East Hawaiʻi representative for Gov. David Ige from 2018 to 2022.

Hope’s Chief Operating Officer Kali French said staff are on site 24-hours-a-day and go over emergency procedures when residents move into the shelter.

There are also monthly shelter meetings and monthly inspections conducted by Hope Services staff using a checklist from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “We’re very confident in the procedures we have in place,” French said.

But those briefings cannot alter the features of the building that are out of compliance with county code, including window sills that exceed the recommended height for escape or rescue.

Photos of the interior provided by Boyd show the low edge of the bedroom window sills are 52 inches high, exceeding the maximum in the county building code, which specifies “when windows are provided as a means of escape or rescue they shall have a finished sill height of not more than 44 inches above the floor.”

In one of the photos of a bedroom in unit #6, Boyd stands against the windows for scale, the lower sill starts just under her shoulder. She says she is a little more than 5 feet 10 inches tall.

The windows are the glass louver blades familiar to Hawaiʻi residents, which are allowed under county code. But Boyd noted those jalousies would require major force to remove or break — beyond the capability of most of the residents, she said, especially if smoke makes them less visible. Insect screens also are attached to the outside of the windows, further hampering a quick escape.

Boyd, who has an engineering and construction background, said she has raised the safety issues with staff on multiple occasions, including that smoke alarms have sometimes malfunctioned.

She also said French’s claim of 24-hour staffing is not always true.

“There are some nights when no staff are on the property, just a note on the office door window with the phone number to Kīhei Pua family shelter down on Kapiʻolani Street,” Boyd said.

A need for a secondary emergency exit has not come up in any of the government funding agreements that Hope Services had entered into, according to Oguma, the director.

However, in its application for a grant last year from the Department of Labor and Industrial Relations’ Office of Community Services, Hope said that its facilities adhere to “all State and local health, safety, building and fire codes, regulations and standards.”

Results Of Homelessness Funding Questioned

Since 2022, the Hawaiʻi County Homelessness and Housing Fund has awarded more than $33.5 million to nonprofits across Hawaiʻi Island. Hope Services has received close to a third of those funds.

In December, Hope Services received $900,000 for long-term housing and $600,000 for its support programs from the fund as part of $6 million awarded to programs that address housing and homelessness on the Big Island. That made it the largest overall recipient with $1.5 million, followed by the Neighborhood Place of Puna with $1.35 million.

The awards passed by a narrow 5-4 vote during a heated council meeting, however, after some council members questioned the fund’s effectiveness in reducing the island’s homeless population.

During the meeting, Kona council member Rebecca Villegas voiced concerns about the same organizations continuing to receive funding, despite an evident lack of progress.

Hope Services CEO Brandee Menino has defended the nonprofit’s record of transitioning vulnerable residents into affordable housing. The challenge, she said, is the population of unhoused people continues to grow.

While the December council vote kept the funding tap open for now, last month the Governmental Operations and External Affairs Committee asked the county auditor to conduct a performance audit of the program.

Results of that audit are due toward the end of this year, and the county funding is currently authorized through 2027.

Civil Beat’s reporting on women’s and girls’ issues is funded in part by the Frost Family Foundation.

This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.